Not everyone’s a technophile

When you engage Happy Cog in a full scale web redesign, you typically come out of the project with a fully integrated content management system (or CMS). The implementation of a CMS implies that you and your team will have access to a tool that will facilitate updating content across the entire website. The system creates an abstract of the website using simple forms to enable content entry. Completing those forms will generate all the necessary callouts, sidebars, related links, archives, etc. from which your site is built.

Sounds great, and if you’re a web designer or developer you may be thinking “yeah, so what, CMS’s are easy.” Well fearless web designer, what happens when using the CMS is difficult? What about those of us who don’t work on a computer from 9:00 to 5:00 and are just looking to make site updates?

For those of you who fall into that latter group: don’t worry. Part of the Happy Cog process involves a detailed CMS training (no matter what system we implement). Best of all, that training is conducted at the start of the build phase, not the end.

Wait, what?

Yes, at the start of the build. We prefer to conduct training at the start of the build for several reasons:

Training serves as a great introduction to the CMS build phase. We use our time together during training to educate you on the system as well as on our process. Our goal is to help you understand, at a high level, what it is we’re doing (in code) so you can better understand how your content fits. We’re not looking for you to jump in and start writing code, but if you can better understand how your content affects our code and how our code affects your content, then we can both have more intelligent conversations when issues arise.

Training provides time for content entry. Once the system is set up and your team is trained, you’re off to the races. This should provide you and your team with ample time to enter content before the site goes live. Unlike traditional trainings conducted at the end of the CMS implementation, placing training earlier in the process gives you time to acclimate to the system. Best of all, working interactively like this means that when the content entry is done, the CMS build is done and you’re ready to launch. No more three-month delays to launch while you prepare and format your content in the CMS.

You’re not left out in the cold. Working through content entry while your vendor is still in active development provides a safety net for any unexpected issues. If you run across an issue where images aren’t displaying correctly or content isn’t showing up as you would have expected, it’s no problem, there are project hours left to work through those issues.

Our goal with any project is to help our clients help themselves, and a CMS build is the ideal way to do that. Our process is set up to help even the staunchest technophobics get in and get comfortable updating content on the web.

Oh, and if you’re a technophile, not a technophobe, don’t you worry either. We’ll tailor our training to the people in the room. So if you want to talk caching mechanisms and HTML5 support, we can do that too.